North Carolina-Wilson County-December 10

I am the dad to five adult children. As they were growing up I attempted to remind them they were special and to implore them to learn something new. My goal was to do that daily.

In 2016 my goal is to learn something new daily on the people, places, and things that make North Carolina special. Everyday this year I am doing a post on what I have learned new.

Ten years before the end of the Civil War in 1855 pieces of Edgecombe County, Johnston County, Nash County, and Wayne County were carved out to form Wilson County. The county seat of Wilson is the Wilson, NC.

Map below outlined in red shows Wilson County.

A number of significant institutions began in Wilson County.

Late 1880’s Wilson became birthplace of BB&T bank.

In 1902, leaders of the Disciples of Christ founded Atlantic Christian College, now Barton College, in Wilson. Film Star Ava Gardner attended ACC in the 1940’s.

The short-lived Wilson Female Academy was founded in 1859. It served briefly as a Confederate military hospital. In 1871, local Primitive Baptists purchased the facility and converted it into the Wilson Collegiate Institute, which flourished as a private school until it failed in the 1890s.

North Carolina historian Robert D. W. Connor, son of federal judge Henry Groves Connor, was born in Wilson in 1878; President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Connor the first archivist of the United States in 1934.